skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that apple did bring it all together rather well (over a sustained marketing and development phase) but I just don't see how anyone could think that smart phones similar to those that we have today weren't inevitable with or without apple.

http://mobile.engadget.com/2006/02/21/review-cingular-8125/
This was released over a year before the first iphone.

I think that apple's contribution was not so much innovation as it was popularisation.
I don't see the point of worrying about volatility. The price moves and people don't know why. So what? I don't care if traders get heartburn - that's part of the job.

The real problem with HFT is its basic unfairness. Firms that aren't physically located near the exchanges are at a disadvantage, as well as individuals located anywhere. I like Glenn Reynolds' idea of adding a randomized delay of up to one second to every trade.
I'd be interested in the trending between points. For example I would just love to see how the trend went after a candidate said certain things and indeed trend based upon the last N minutes. The one which Romney says "I'm gonna (sounded like that too me) stop the subsidy to PBS", Now that would be interesting too me, along with many other statements by them both.

Fascinating stuff, I also noted a few posts positive to romney that wer associated as obama as obama was mentioned and vice a versa. I suspect a first mentioned corralation, though have seen exceptions to that, i'd paste examples but no pause button and late. To truely seperate those type of posts is something were you will need to crowdsource down the line if only to learn a rule set. Though tweets are short so permutations will not be that dynamic as apposed to more open social means and with that the limitation can only help.

Anybody aware of a ruleset that can weight one person over another based upon the content of block of text that mentions both people. Certainly would have uses beyond this. Amazing how something so simple as that involves alot more than you would initialy think.
Facebook's cold storage
I doubt that HFT traders really engage into frontrunning or market manipulation. It is illegal. Supporting HFT infrastructure R&D is expensive. And takes nontrivial effort. It is simply too risky to engage in illegal activities.

Edit: no point -> too risky
BTW some great feedback in the post comments from Lockitron co-founder Paul with more detail on how & why they took this approach: http://danielodio.com/dissecting-the-massively-over-subscrib...
But wouldn't it be cool if you had a record of someone entering your house to kill you? Like imagine if OJ Simpson was a Lockitron customer...
You know, I was going to write that it was a given since CSS is applied to a markup language so you need some sort of markup, and that you were being pedantic.

But then I thought it would be neat if someone were to make the Mona Lisa as ASCII art using only valid CSS, thus rendering a truly pure CSS version. I guess you could further argue that it isn't pure CSS because it also involves something to display the text.
Is there really a problem here that's worth regulating?

They point out flash crashes as being a big problem--those flash crashes quickly correct themselves back to their "true" value (whatever that means), and the people most hurt are the people who were using bad algorithms and took risks they didn't understand, Knight Capital being a recent example.

They reference volume being much higher than it ever has been on account of hft, which is true. But what does that have to do with the bubble of the 90s? Higher volume != stock market ruin.

Then there's the small time investor getting hurt. But are they really? The whims of the market now occur because of algorithmic trading as opposed to before, when the whims of the market occurred because of--who knows? Small time investors have been winning and losing since the system was invented. Markets can and always will be fickle.

So again, what exactly is the problem here?
"There is simply no point engaging into illegal activities."

There are many major firms such as SAC capital that built a business around insider trading (which is also illegal).

Just yesterday: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-02/ex-sac-capital-m...
From what I have observed, Objectivism's problems lie in the fact that its "me" message is inherently attractive to people who probably need psychiatric treatment for their tendencies which trend towards sociopathy.

Most people who buy into Rand's philosophy essentially buy into this message, it is rather pointless to try to debate the more subtle points of her philosophy with them.

IMHO, human society is neither about collectivism or individualism but a dynamic balance of the two.
At least it's better than X in pure HTML5.
Want less emphasis on speed? Let tick marks be less than $0.01. Market-makers are clearly willing to provide spreads of less than $0.01. Any time the price of something is artificially moved out of market equilibrium, there will be queueing (either to buy or sell the good). In this case, there is queuing to provide liquidity, and market-makers have every incentive to try and jump the queue. Instead of competing on price (they can't), they compete on speed.
NBA adopts new anti-flopping rules
It is only a matter of time until somebody gets a webbrowser running inside another with javascript as a joke.

And just a bit longer until someone has it running inside Minecraft
Google's Nexus program to see "huge changes"
Sure, but by making it hard for legitimate companies to spam you, we get a much clearer separation of spam from ham. You don't have to know who all the bad guys are, it's enough to know who all the good guys are.

These days, messages in my inbox fall into two categories: Messages with an "unsubscribe" link, or spam.

This didn't use to happen in the olden days.
Ask HN: Solo Founder Group?
Hi all,

I'm currently a solo founder working on a startup (expect to see a "Show HN" sometime soon™) and one thing I miss is having a few people to share small successes/frustrations with, or to field opinions and questions. I'm sure there are other people here who feel the same way.

Are there any groups like this already? I'd be happy to start organizing something. Ideally, I'm envisioning a tight-knit group of maybe a half dozen to a dozen startups, where we'd all be familiar with each other's businesses.

Thoughts?
Unlike HFT, insider trading doesn't require investment into infrastructure and R&D.
Apple Turning to Select Retail Store Employees to Help Improve Maps for iOS 6
I know, I was being a little pedantic and tongue-in-cheek at the same time, hah.

Still true though.
The point of the stock market is to invest in companies, not extract value from the public. The benefits of HFT have run their course, now it's simply a tax on the small traders who want to get into the market.

What is the benefit?
Haha, don't apologize. I was being a little goofy for the sake of it.
> But the technical co-founder should understand that it's a startup, are people really not that open to taking a cut now for the possibility of better returns later?

It depends on the possibility! "Possibility" could mean "vague chance in hell," it could mean "almost a sure thing," or it could mean anything inbetween. They need to feel that this "possibility" is enough to offset what they're giving up. Nobody's going to say, "Oh, this will probably be a huge loss, but they're a startup, so it's OK." They need to feel strongly that what you're proposing will be more rewarding in the long run than their other prospects. If you can't persuade anyone that working with you will be highly rewarding, then either a) You need to work on your communication and persuasion skills, b) What you are proposing is just not worth these people's time, or c) You're approaching the totally wrong kind of person.
I chose Microsoft partly for the money and would do so again.

I know at least one person at Google who used to work in finance and would not have worked at Google without competitive salary.
I got hellbanned for that comment, so obviously you're wrong.
I'm happy that there seems to be some discontent here on the substance of this article. Indeed, we perceive market 'crashes' to be negative, but in fact they (necessarily) benefit as many people as they hurt. Being able to obtain stock in a company for fewer US$ can be a good thing. And who's to say that banning algorithmic trading will prevent rapid swings in the market? They happened before algorithmic trading was here, and they will happen afterwards.

All of this rhetoric seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to something the author is incapable of grokking (no doubt due to a limited human capacity to do so).
I'm signed up for CS50x and 6.00x (Introduction to Computer Science).

6.00x has started and is great. It's taught in python, which I've had some exposure to before (having done the exercises in Learn Python The Hard Way). So far, I'm finding edX's delivery to be superior to Coursera's. I'm looking forward to starting CS50x.

My housemate started the 6.002x course last session, and said it was great (but did not have the time available to finish it).
Hollywood isn't going to fix itself. I still think anyone attempting to deal with them is crazy (speaking from experience), but leaving them alone just lets Hollywood get even more insulated from reality.
>So why would you invest time in trying to stop one route of copying when there is a second unstoppable?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management

Good question. I'd like to know also.

On another note, let's be honest. A lot of people today don't know print screen. I'd say the majority. But 10 years ago? That image to table conversion must have been a bank vault.
I've always said that recreating the Mona Lisa is the 'Hello World!' of the art community. Curious to see the two combining like this.
Would it not be easier to explain to them that what they're asking for is impossible to deliver?
Objective-C is an open source project, like the webkit browser. Google adopted webkit for Chrome, for example. There is nothing prevent anyone else from adopting Objective C. Your logic is pretty flawed. Just because Objective C has not gained wide adoption doesn't mean that it's not open to be adopted. Google uses "Java" for Android. Java is open source. You can download the source and build it.

Mono is fine but it's not nearly as good as Microsoft's compiler. C# is a great language. It would be great if Microsoft simply open sourced it.
bet you there's a limit. 65536 maybe?
I'd say that, until this summer, only core hackers claimed to use or even try Perl 6 to get anything business like done.

chromatic's comment below is gracious but I think he had a quite unpleasant experience, at least business-wise. And he was a core hacker.

The most fun example I know of of someone, other than a core-hacker, planning to use Perl 6 in a production setting, is Sir Robert, as discussed on his 6ing.org blog and introduced at http://www.6ing.org/?p=6

(I would describe myself as an avid Perl 6 watcher. I've been watching it for 12 years. For the last 18 months I've read pretty much the entire days' worth of dialog of the freenode #perl6 IRC channel, nowadays the main hub of Perl 6 activity. And in the last few weeks I've been selecting a subset of log lines representing the gist of each day's activity. For example: http://irclog.perlgeek.de/out.pl?channel=perl6;date=yesterda...)
Investment of someone elses money. To someone out there this is a rational risk to take.
"I would like to die on Mars," Elon Musk says, "Just not on impact." [1]

Many HN readers may already know, but pay attention to SpaceX. There's nobody even close to what they're doing, and they aren't slowing down.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/71446-elon-musk...
Reminds me of an idea where a company trains people to be professional bloggers by addicting them to writing, and in exchange a fixed salary is given.
Why you’d be stupid to bet against HTML5
It's not about selling, it's about having something worth buying. Does a techie look at your situation and say "I want me some o' that?". If not, no amount of high-pressure selling is going to make your company/idea significantly more compelling to someone who isn't interested.
I thought all these computer trading algorithms had failsafes so they abandon the market when something goes wrong? Liquidity that disappears like that doesn't seem so useful.
Dilithium crystals weren't used in the impulse drive though, they're used to catalyse the matter/antimatter reaction through their crystal structure.

Also it seems to be fusion pulse propulsion. Pretty good for going fast.
I would like to say that I was misquoted in this op-ed. I have never said that "high-speed technology was “a destructive force in the market” with “no social benefit.”" I said that there is a limit to the benefit of speed, and we're finding that the latency race to 0 has found that limit.
What you're talking about in the last paragraph is sentiment analysis. This is really cool stuff, but it's tricky. Even if you have 2 humans do sentiment analysis independently, they agree with each other only 70% of the time. Computers tend to do worse, of course.

What makes it extra challenging is that tweets are short, so you have wide error bars on the sorts of math you'd depend on in larger corpuses. I think you'd have to actually bang a parser against it and try to understand what the tweeter is saying.
Btw, here's an example of somebody trying to do sentiment analysis on tweets: http://www.sentiment140.com/search?hl=en&query=romney.
Apple begins iPad mini production
It looks nice, but it breaks default browser navigation standards. The space bar doesn't paginate, and scrolling to the end of the page doesn't stop scrolling, but forces me back to the top of the page. This is happening in Safari, can't attest to other browsers, but I found it distracting.
Google makes 99% of its money from ads, and it has pretty much always been that way.

They're definitely an ad company.
Turbolinks: update  without reloading whole page
Knight almost blinked out of existence due to computers screwing up. Why is it a stretch to think that far worse catastrophes are also likely to happen at some point? The systematic risk is large, and the benefit is near zero.
The sisterhood of the travelling Rails coders
Congrats Lemon. Ben and Marc are both ridiculous Gs in their own right, and I'm glad you guys hooked it up.
Excellent point! I hadn't thought of that. It strikes me, then, that Joint Stereo would actually be better in this case, as it effectively encodes the mono signal and the L/R difference, which is what you're after anyway for this purpose.
For every trade you will incur some transaction cost. You may think that even though there is a Bid and an Ask price, you may on average get somewhere in the middle, but you don't. Your buy trades are likely to be filled on the Ask price and your sell trades are likely to be filled on the Bid price because some intermediary will get in between and pocket the spread. This has been the case, this is the case, and I haven't seen viable solutions to this what so ever.

What has changed over the past decade is who that intermediary is and how much of the spread they can steal. In 2001 New York Stock Exchange reduced the minimum listed price increments from $1/8 to $.01 . This spread used to be collected by exchange "specialists" with inherited seats on the floor for providing liquidity. The rise of alternative exchanges and computers allowed third parties to cut in to provide liquidity with smaller spreads and cutting out the specialists. These third parties are high frequency traders.

Investors are still loosing the spread on each trade they make, but it is so much less than it used to be. There are issues with the market microstructures that could be addressed, but trying to push computer generated should not be it.

I for one, never want to go back to the dark days of specialists and their $.125 and $.25 spreads.

PS. This was a discussion of the minimum transaction cost you can have. Additionally you may have to pay fees to your broker ( especially if you are retail and don't trade a lot ). If you are trading lots of shares at a clip you will also encounter costs from the market impact of your trades.
The problem is the financialization of the economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

"One of the most important impetuses to the rise of financialization was the end of the post-World War Two Bretton Woods system of fixed international exchange rates and the dollar peg to gold in August 1971."

Financialization and the World Economy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...!
http://xkcd.com/678/ sounds like what you're thinking of. ;)
Looks, Look, Good

Also, you should think about stemming - "Looks" and "Look" should be in an equivalence class.
You have 100 shares of FOO. It is trading at $50. You bought it at $40, so you have a stop-loss order to sell it at $35. Some "liquidity provider"'s algorithm goes haywire and the price drops to $30. The exchange's "circuit breakers" halt trading or revert the trades, and then the price quickly goes back up to $50.

Unfortunately for you, your brokerage's computer saw the price drop, executed your stop-loss order, and put your shares up for sale, which were then purchased by another 'liquidity provider' (or hell, maybe even the same one that caused the value to drop in the first place). You've now lost $1500 because of HFT. Your trade can't be reverted, because fuck you, that's why, but the holy "market makers" get their trades rolled back so that their rich friends don't suffer anything for their alogrithmic fail.
Dreamweaver, your time could be now
Unintended consequences alert: read up on the UK stamp duty on UK equity trades. Goldman Sachs creates a derivative security matching the return of the underlying equity that you can trade with GS and avoid paying the stamp duty. Net result: GS makes money, less liquidity for the average investor. Rock on transaction taxes.
Adding CSS class in module code
And apparently, "This Site Totally Doesn't Work Without JavaScript."
That's like saying app.net makes similar revenue per user as John Deere from a sale of a tractor.
Not necessarily. The rock may only be a few centimetres underneath the sand dune, in which case it would not appear to protrude out from the dune significantly. There is also the possibility that the "spiders" are black sand[0][1] or silt, as they look suspiciously like some formations on Earth (albeit on a much larger scale):

[2]: This is a sand dune on a sand island, but has some black discolouration from rock just below the surface. I'm not sure how far down this rock extends, but its visibility varies depending on the time of year and number of visitors to the island. Note that there is also some grass (brown) and other vegetation (green) around the edge of the clearing (particularly on the southern edge), which is difficult to distinguish from the black rock.

[3]: Same island, different clearing. There is still some vegetation in the picture, but it's easier to see the black sand and rock underneath the top layer of white sand.

Try playing with the time slider at the top of the page to see how the exposure of the rock changes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_sand
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_mineral_sands_ore_deposi...
[2] http://www.nearmap.com/?ll=-27.194111,153.379091&z=21...
[3] http://www.nearmap.com/?ll=-27.280641,153.410605&z=20...
What Would You Do?
Where were you 20+ years ago? :)
And the price for most horrible abuse of box-shadow goes to....

(Nice hack, though; didn't know box-shadow could be abused that way)
Contracts only mean what the courts say they mean. And if your only agreement is a "yes" typed into a text field or a checkbox clicked, probably mean even less than that.
If I had a thousand dollars for every HN post that works in Chrome and not Firefox, I'd feel somewhat better about what that suggests.
Perhaps we can bang a Snowball stemmer against it and get pretty good coverage on the whole language.
I would say the best way is through careful social observation. Put yourself in many different types of situations and observe the unspoken "rules" around mannerisms. Try and eat at different restaurants, attend a ball game, go to the opera, join a meetup -- each one of these different scenarios will help you learn and grow.
But the rules of citation prescribe that you give a section or page number. Giving a URL is a neat technical solution, but it's not a proper citation.
I agree with your broader point, but if the United States has a comparative advantage in entrepreneurship, it's not actually zero-sum.

That is, if the American legal system, venture funding, etc., combine to offer a foreign entrepreneur a better likelihood of building a successful company there than in her home country—and there's some evidence that that's often the case—then letting her emigrate to the United States should be a net gain for the global economy.
Even offline playlists?
Code link:
https://github.com/rails/turbolinks

tl;dr: it's like Plax with less control, but higher ease of implementation. Ships with the next version of rails.
Oooo, that does sound like a good idea. Definitely not a quick way to grow their customer base, but could payoff in a large way if done correctly. Meh, Netflix would probably screw it up under the existing management.
somewhat OT, but for those curious the blogging engine this guy is using is tynan's sett.com
We're looking forward to working with all the new 3D camera technology coming down the pipe, and as soon as we have the resources to do so, we'll start supporting Mac and Linux too.
Where Do All Those Facebook Photos Go?
30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Laurent Pinchart
When one market participant breaks the market with his crappy program, that's a huge problem for the companies that use the public markets to raise money - the entire reason the markets exist. There was plenty of liquidity in the 90's and before to fulfill that function, even with the huge spreads back then. You are missing the forest for the trees.
The real problem is that your "stop loss" is a standing order to sell, at any price, if the price of your asset falls below some threshold. That is fundamentally a bad idea, and it's just this sort of trading behavior that creates liquidity crises.
Five Reasons to prove Linux is Secure than Windows
My point was probably more around branding. Posting is generic; you mean a blog post? Status Update? Tweets are known to be just 140 chars.
Apple Siri Clone in KooKoo wins Hackathon
Breaking the market with a crappy program costs the responsible firm tons of money, up to a complete insolvency.

This system is mostly self-balancing.
I do not think that it was Obama who coded it so it is kind of irrelevant to me.
Are you saying that Quora is fundamentally not valuable bc there are other ways of communicating? I guess if you wanted to learn about plants, you could go learn the Dewey Decimal System and go to the library and look it up in an encyclopedia... or you could about it on Wikipedia. Your response doesn't make sense to me and I don't know the purpose of this discussion at this point.

I just started using Hacker News recently and have never really interacted with internet communities at all prior to this year so I'm open to the possibility that I'm not communicating clearly, or that you're being facetious.
With Droplr support like Tapbots has with Tweetbot, this is the App for me. nice.
No, the real problem is that one person's program broke and caused real losses for other people who were acting rationally. If you must account for a non-zero chance that some geek's algorithm will go totally batshit and lose you a bunch of money in unpredictable ways, there is a huge problem at the very core of the marketplace.
FTC shuts down tech support scams that charged to remove nonexistent malware
Oh, safely storing value isn't a problem: bitaddress.org.

Safely storing value while keeping it liquid, there's a problem.